“Smawty gib mawe an’ babbehs wowstest huwties an’ bad enfies an’ fowebah-sweepies!”
The trembling mare muttered something incomprehensible, staring past the smarty. The human was moving with their normal terrifying silence, speed, and grace. The speed and grace the world had somehow seen fit to give everything but fluffies like her. It wasn’t fair, but nothing was for fluffies.
The smarty froze when the man’s hand closed around his scruff, making a soft gasping sound as the skin was drawn taut around his throat. Like every fluffy, he knew that once he was caught there was no point in trying to fight back. Sorry-poopies or sorry-hoofsies or even bites would only make what came next worst.
“Wow, worstest hurties and bad-enfies and forever-sleepies?” The man’s voice was bright and cheerful, but the mare could tell it was a facade.
“Bestest smawty gib wowstest huwties ebah! Wowstest bad-enfies ebah! Wowstest huwtiest fowebah-sweepies!”
The mare almost collapsed to the ground in horror, grateful that her babbehs were too small to understand the words being said. They couldn’t understand what was going on, only that they were scared. Chirping and cheeping, they clung to her, but she couldn’t muster the will to comfort them. Tears began to dampen the fluff around her eyes.
“All that, huh?” The man’s grin had gone from predatory to ravenous. “I bet you think you’re big stuff.”
The smarty slumped a little, seeing-places screwed tightly closed. “Gib…gib babbehs nu-weggies an’ nu-seein’-pwaces…” he said, each word seeming to be forced from his talky-place.
“Fine,” the man yanked the smarty into the air, the wretched creature not even protesting at the bad-upsies, and carried him away. “I’ll be back.”
“NU TEWW!” the smarty shrieked as he was carried away. “NU TEWW BABBEHS! NEBAH TEWW BABBEHS!”
“Nu wiww teww…” she muttered.
Smarty lay in a stupor, barely aware of his surroundings. Everything was a fog of pain and misery. This was not a good place to be. He was going to be here for the rest of his life.
Something passed in front of his face, and the stinging reek of smelling salts jerked him violently back into lucidity. Immediately, the pain grew into unbearable intensity, the raw stumps of what had once been his leggies, the empty sockets that had once been his seeing-places, and the cold air brushing across the chapped, blistered flesh where the Fluff-B-Gone had stripped away his pretty fluff.
“So,” the voice said, and he instinctively looked towards it, despite knowing that with no seeing-places nothing would ever pierce the blackness around him again. “Do you want to take it back?”
“NU! Bestest smawty nu cawe wut dummeh munstah mistah du! Gib mawe an’ babbehs wowstest huwties an’ bad-enfies an’ fowebah-sweepies an’ nu-seein’-pwaces an’ nu-weggies!”
“If you take it back you can die,” the voice reasoned. “All this pain can stop.”
“NU!”
“Fine. Have it your way.”
Lavender hugged her foals tightly. She loved her new housy. It was warm, and there were always nummies and wawa and toysies and nesties! It was so different from her life before. Everything was perfect here.
Or it would be, if the memories of the smarty would ever stop gnawing away at her.
How long had it been? With no seeing-places, it was impossible to tell if it was bright-time or dark-time, and smarty couldn’t tell if he was awake or having bad sleepy-time-pictures. Everything was pain, and misery, and hunger, and cold.
Every tiny subconscious movement sent waves of pain through his tortured body, his stumps scraped raw again over and over so the agony never stopped. Some time, many forevers ago, something he couldn’t see had been stabbed into the flesh of his belly, forcing him to try to support his weight on the seeping stumps or endure even worse agony.
Smarty had no concept of Hell, so he had nothing to compare his current existence to. But in a particularly cruel twist of fate, his pride as a smarty wouldn’t allow him to just give up. As much as he desperately wished he could just…fall away, go catatonic like so many other fluffies he’d seen, he was trapped here in a cage of damned lucidity.
Eventually, he started counting forevers. It didn’t really work, since he had no way of knowing how long each forever was or how many had passed. He’d reached many forevers many, many times. But it was something to focus on besides the pain, cold, and hunger.
“You could have avoided all this,” the voice said, trying to convince him to take back what he’d said again. “You could have died at any time.”
“Nu…” he gasped, barely able to form words.
“Fair enough,” the voice said, and smarty felt a hand grabbing the near-skinless flesh of his neck. “I’m bored now.”
As the hand squeezed tighter and tighter, denying smarty even a single breath, the voice spoke again. “That’s seventeen credits. Four and four and four and four and one. Good job.”
As eternity took him, smarty managed a smile.
Lavender hovered by the door to the saferoom anxiously, as she did every day around this time. Mummah was back!
She should have been happy, she thought. Even if she knew mummah cared nothing for her or her nearly-grown babbehs, she should be happy. Instead, she felt anxiousness and terror, waiting for news she always feared hearing. Waiting to hear a number that would quantify her fate.
“It’s over.”
If she could, Lavender would have prayed. Four and four and four and three. An impossible number. Four for a housy. Four for nummies. Four for nesties. Three for toysies.
Silently she prepared herself to tell her babbehs what they would lose. If it was just the toysies and the nesties, they would be okay. She wouldn’t, couldn’t explain why they would be taken away, but they would be okay without them. A little bit of cold and no toysies wouldn’t be too bad.
If it was the nummies or, and she felt her belly churn at the thought, the housy as well…they’d lose a lot more. She’d spent a lot of nights preparing to tell her babbehs that she’d be gone forever. She would not let them lose their home and food, not before she went to get the credits herself!
“Seventeen. Four fours and a one.”
Lavender slumped to the floor, relief stealing all the strength from her. They would be okay! They wouldn’t lose anything! They were safe!
“Tank 'ou, speshow-fwend.”
Smarties, the entry noted, earn an average of 6.7 credits, compared to the average non-smarty earnings of 4.3. Fluffies donating credits to their mates or offspring earn on average 3 additional credits, regardless of smarty status. Subject 918-B, an outlier, earned a total of 17 credits.
Included is a list of credits awarded:
Rape: 2 credits.
Blinding: 4 credits.
Pillowing: 4 credits.
Torture: 1 credit per week, lasted 2 weeks.
Death: 5 credits.
Addendum: Fluffies seem to be unable to comprehend the concept of currency. As a result, rather than giving credits, fluffies consistently refer to the act of donating as giving the action in question. E.g. “giving forever-sleepies.”
26 Likes
So this was some sort of social experiment? So what seemed to be threats were actually all the things the Smarty was going to subject himself to for their sake?
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I am confusion
1 Like
I see a flaw; this is going to make good fluffies go extinct and no one will want the remaining ones.
ETA: Also, does “give bad enfies” here imply that the human experimenter fucked the fluffy?
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Yes. It doesn’t really make a ton of sense that the fluffy would phrase it that way except for the needs of the story’s twist.